Recent years have
brought a vast expansion in our understanding and knowledge of music of earlier
periods. There has been investigation into the repertoire and techniques of
other ages, coupled with a movement that has favoured the use of instruments
and ways of playing them that are more or less authentic. Even where surviving
historical instruments or modern reproductions of them are not used, the styles
of performance have been influenced. Above all the myth of unending progress
has been abandoned in favour of an evaluation of each period and type of music
on its own terms. Early Music, in fact, has become a flourishing industry,
stimulated by the remarkable growth in the production and distribution of
records.

For our present purposes
we limit the term Early Music to cover a period ranging from plainchant to the
end of the seventeenth century. The period that followed, the age of Bach and
Handel and the great synthesis of the Late Baroque, is generally more familiar
to listeners and is, in any case, another story.

CD I

Medieval and
Renaissance Music

The Middle Ages

Historians warn
against the fault of periodisation. Human activities can never be packaged so
neatly and musical styles inevitably overlap. The Middle Ages, a concept coined
by optimists of the sixteenth century to disparage what had gone before, may be
assumed to span the period from the rise of Christianity to the so-called
Renaissance, a term that will need further definition. Musically such a long
period, a millennium in itself, has been subjected to further subdivisions. At
least in the earlier years it is possible to regard Western Europe as a
cultural entity in itself. Within the long period that followed the decay of
the Roman Empire we may distinguish between three elements. The first must be
the surviving tradition of plainchant, a single-line melody in free rhythm,
setting words from the Latin liturgy. The second is the beginning of polyphony,
music for a combination of different melodic lines, denigrated by a later
generation as the Ars Antiqua, the old art. The third is the Ars Nova, the new
art, as some then called it, music of greater complexity that was developed in
the fourteenth century.

Plainchant and
Devotional Music

Gregorian chant, a
form of plainchant, became the official music of the Catholic Church. The
remoter origins of the chant stem from the synagogue and from the Greco-Roman
pagan world. An element of standardisation is attributed to Pope Gregory the
Great in the sixth century, but the tradition of plainchant continued primarily
as an oral one, until the development of exact pitch notation some three
hundred years later. Experts may distinguish between the standardised Gregorian
chant and regional variants, such as the Ambrosian chant of Milan, attributed
to St Ambrose. Ambrosian chant, represented on the sampler by a setting of the Kyrie
eleison (Lord have mercy) drawing on Eastern traditions, is the oldest
surviving type of plainchant [1]. For the ordinary listener or participant,
plainchant represents a continuing tradition, in its serenity and relative
simplicity a reminder of another world. The texts set include Psalms, calling
for a simple and repetitive form, Hymns, with a repeated melody for each
metrical stanza, and Alleluias, with their demand for more elaborate
decoration. The antiphon In paradisum (‘Into Paradise’) is taken from
the Office for the Dead [2].

An extension of this
early tradition may be seen in additions to plainchant repertoire, settings of
new hymns, musical drama derived from the liturgy and in work such as that of
the mystic, poet and abbess Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century, the
latter typically in Opastor animarum (‘O Shepherd of souls’)
[3]. The chant had an important part to play in later music, when it was used
as the foundation of structures of greater complexity.

Secular and Popular
Monody

If polyphony is music
with many divergent voices, monody offers a single melody, as plainchant does.
There is a fascinating surviving repertoire of songs from the twelfth and
thirteenth century troubadours of Provence and the trouvères, their counterpart
to the north. Important for their poetry as well as their music, the
troubadours, often men of noble or royal birth, like the imprisoned English
King Richard Cœur de Lion [4], sang of courtly love, as did their counterparts
in Germany, the Minnesinger, poet-composers like Walther von der Vogelweide.
Other subjects included the crusades, the subject of the latter's Song of
Palestine [5]. Texts set may have a religious subject, as in the remarkable
collection of over four hundred songs in the Spanish Cantigas de Santa Maria
assembled by King Alfonso the Wise, thirteenth-­century King of Leon and
Castile. These draw on varied music, popular melodies and the troubadour
tradition, setting narrative texts that tell of miracles and pilgrimages, in
praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, including a punning Ave et Eva, Ave from
the angel's greeting to the Blessed Virgin and Eva from Eve, the source
of original sin [6]. Secular music from the fourteenth century is illustrated
in dance music from the period of Boccaccio's Decameron, itself a
valuable source of information about instrumental performance in the middle
years of the century [7].

Early Polyphony

For various reasons hardly
any secular music survives from earlier periods, except where a tune may have
acquired alternative religious words, thus depriving the Devil of his own.
Polyphony, the art of setting one part against another, one melodic line
against another, had developed by the ninth century, generally in a simple form
in which one voice accompanied another at a fixed interval above or below, or
embroidered a simple underlying plainchant. This was later disparaged as the
Ars Antiqua, the old art. There was an increase in complexity that reached a
height with the so-called Ars Nova, the new art of the fourteenth century, the
age of Chaucer and Boccaccio, and, in music, of composers like Guillaume de
Machaut, distinguished also as a poet. Machaut left a famous setting of the
Mass in his Messe de Notre Dame, one of the earliest such examples, and
a number of secular songs, using the formal metrical structures of the period
[8]. Techniques of notation were now developed that allowed relatively complex
rhythms to be recorded.

The Renaissance

If there are
difficulties in defining the period of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance is much
harder to pin down. On a number of occasions, in the history of Western Europe,
there had been a rebirth of classical learning, an attempt to revive something
of the culture of the ancient world of Greece and Rome. It has been
conventional in music history to limit the period of the Renaissance to that
between about 1430 and the year 1600. Once again there are trends in music and
thought that inevitably overlap these simple dates. It is possible,
nevertheless, to see a general unity of styles, although the centres in which
these flourished may vary.

Early Renaissance

[a] Instrumental Music

Instrumental music of
the fifteenth century is found in a remarkable collection, the Codex Faenza.
Originating in Ferrara, the codex contains the earliest examples of French and
Italian instrumental music, to be played, as so often at this time, on whatever
instruments might be suitable and available, colourful and varied in their
timbres [9].

[b] Vocal Music

Music and the arts
flourished in the fifteenth century particularly at the court of Burgundy.
Under the dukes Philip the Bold, Philip the Good and Charles the Bold,
territories were acquired so that the dukedom included the Netherlands as well
as the intervening lands of Luxemburg, Lorraine, Alsace and Franche Comté. It
was here that composers such as Binchois and Busnois wrote their songs, at a
court where the arts flourished in rich abundance. Perhaps the greatest
musician of his time, Guillaume Dufay was associated with the Burgundian city
of Cambrai, although he also spent time in Rome and elsewhere in Italy. Like
many of his contemporaries he wrote both sacred and, as here, secular music
[10]. Another Franco-Netherlands composer, Alexander Agricola, also spent time
in Cambrai, at the French court and in Italy. He ended his life in the service
of Philip the Fair, Duke of Burgundy, and is here represented by a secular
composition [11]. These composers wrote secular chansons, settings of
formal love-poems, which often provided material for more adventurous
polyphonic development in sacred music. The polyphonic style of these
compositions was frequently based either on plainchant or on another existing melody
of secular origin. Of these last the famous L’Homme armé (‘The Armed
Man’) was among the most popular. Composers indirectly connected with the court
of Burgundy include Johannes Ockeghem, who spent forty years at the French
court. The original song is here followed by the opening of a Mass based upon
it [12].

The independence of
Burgundy came to an end with the death of Charles the Bold at the battle of
Nancy in 1477. The same year brought the marriage of his daughter Maria to the
Habsburg Maximilian I, who thus added Burgundian territories to his own. Their
son Philip the Fair, Agricola's last patron, married Joanna the Mad, daughter
of Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon and Castile, securing vast territories for
their son, the future Emperor Charles V. The political changes had their effect
on music, not least on the wide diffusion of a style of polyphony that had its
roots in Northern France and the Netherlands.

Middle Renaissance

Musically, at least,
it is possible to distinguish a middle Renaissance period. This brings a
consolidation of polyphonic style. Medieval polyphony had tended to make a
sharp differentiation between simultaneous melodic lines. The bottom part might
often be in slower notes, with a second, third and fourth part added above, each
with increased elaboration. Each line might be entrusted to a different type of
instrument or voice, making a contrast both of each melodic line and of timbre.
The Renaissance, however, brought a gradual blending of these parts. The bass
now sang the same kind of melodic line as the soprano, while families of
instruments were developed to provide a similarity of sound between each line
of the music.

[a] Vocal Music

The dominant figure in
the period that covers the last years of the fifteenth century and the first
decades of the sixteenth must be Josquin Desprez, who was born in Northern
France and inherited the tradition of Ockeghem. Like Dufay, for a time he
served the Sforzas in Milan and was later a member of the papal choir in Rome.
His life ended in Northern France. In common with other contemporaries he wrote
both sacred and secular music, the former including two Masses using L’Homme
armé as a basis, and a number of motets, settings of sacred texts,
including a moving composition based on David's lament over the death of his
disloyal son Absalom [13]. Of almost similar fame was the Netherlands composer
Jacob Obrecht [14], who also served in various Italian courts and was regarded
by many as second only to Josquin.

Josquin died in 1521,
the year of the Diet of Worms that divided the Habsburg territories from the
Empire of Charles V and placed under an imperial ban Martin Luther, whose
movement of religious reform now took on apolitical form. Early Lutheran music
often draws on plainchant for its melodies, now used for popular German hymns
or chorales, the basis of a new tradition.

Other surviving
popular music may be heard in the music of a new Jewish diaspora, the music of
Spanish Jewry, the Sephardim, expelled from Spain in 1492 as Ferdinand and
Isabella consolidated their power. Those thus displaced often found a welcome
in the lands of the Ottoman Empire, to which they brought linguistic and
cultural traditions that still survive [15].

[b] Instrumental Music

In 1500 Petrucci had
established in Venice a means of printing polyphonic music with movable type.
This led to the diffusion of compositions by composers like Josquin. By 1507 he
was printing lute music, forestalling Marco dall'Aquila, who had been granted a
licence for such publication [16]. Others followed, often with lute
arrangements of vocal works. With this came books on how to play the lute, how
to read the form of notation used, lute tablature, and how to pluck the strings
with the right hand. Among the most distinguished lutenists and composers for
the lute was Francesco Canova da Milano, who spent much of his life in the
papal service [17]. The popularity of the lute was not confined to Italy. In
Spain the related vihuela de mano (hand-viol) inspired a continuing repertoire,
while there were parallel developments throughout Europe.

It was in Spain that a
particular national music was encouraged. In spite of the expulsion of the Jews
and the conquest of the Moorish kingdoms where diverse traditions of learning
and the arts had flourished, Spanish music retained identifiable elements of
what had been rejected. Something of this can be heard in the 460 surviving
compositions preserved in the Cancionero de Palacio, a royal collection
of music at the Spanish court in the first decades of the sixteenth century
[18].

Other instrumental
music, which might also offer an alternative to sung polyphony, was found in
consort music, music for groups of similar instruments, for sets of viols,
recorders or other instruments, or for mixed groups, broken consorts. The
tradition continued through the seventeenth century.

Later Renaissance

The later sixteenth
century brought a consolidation of earlier religious changes and these had
their effect on music. There were now related political changes and the gradual
emergence of what might be seen as a sharper division between national styles.

[a] Vocal Music

[1] Sacred Music

Sacred polyphony may
now be regarded as at its height in the work of Palestrina in Rome, the
Franco-Flemish composer Lassus in Munich, the Spaniard Victoria in Rome and
Madrid and the recusant William Byrd in London. These composers provided a
polyphonic repertoire of seamless interwoven textures, a style that was to form
the foundation of future musical training. Palestrina, in particular, has been
taken as a master of the stile antico, the old style, as opposed to the
experimental uses of harmony that followed in the next generation. His writing
provided a model of polyphonic style for future composers and for generations
of music students up to the present day. Under the patronage of Pope Julius III
he served at the Cappella Giulia at St Peter's as director of music and
subsequently at St John Lateran and Santa Maria Maggiore, before returning to
St Peter's. Legend credits him with saving polyphony at a time when members of
the Council of Trent sought a simplification of church music, in order to give
primacy to the text. In a Mass for Pope Marcellus and elsewhere he demonstrated
the possibility of ensuring the clarity of the text in a polyphonic setting. He
left a large quantity of sacred music, as well as secular madrigals. His Super
flumina Babylonis (‘By the waters of Babylon’) is a five-voice setting of
an offertory text [19].

Born at Mons in
Hainaut, Orlando de Lassus was a composer of the greatest versatility. His
early career was at the court of Mantua, followed by service in Naples and in
Rome. For much of his life, however, he worked in Munich in the service of Duke
Albrecht V of Bavaria and his successor. He wrote and published a considerable
quantity of sacred music, in addition to secular songs, Italian madrigals and
settings of French and German texts. In these he demonstrates a wider variety
of styles than Palestrina. The Kyrie eleison (‘Lord have mercy’) from
his eight-voice Mass Bell'Amfitrit, altera, its title suggesting its
secular source, demonstrates the skill of the composer, as exhibited in some
sixty surviving Mass settings [20].

Tomás Luis de Victoria
was born at Avila. As a young man he was employed as a singer at the Jesuit
German College in Rome, where he later became director of music. Ordained
priest in 1575, he joined the Oratorians, the association of secular priests
established by St Philip Neri. He was eventually able to return to Spain as
chaplain to the Dowager Empress, daughter of Charles V and widow of Maximilian
II, to whom Charles had entrusted the administration of the Austrian
territories of the Habsburgs. Victoria's compositions include settings of the
Mass and other liturgical and sacred texts, in a style that reflects that of
Palestrina. A setting of the Gloria is taken from his four-voice Mass O quam
gloriosum (‘O how glorious’), published in 1592 but based on a motet he had
written twenty years before [21].

The religious changes
in England during the sixteenth century are reflected in the sacred music of
the period, from the conservative and elaborate compositions of the earlier
part of the century to the less inspired music demanded by the reforms under
Edward VI, displaced by the return to Catholicism under Queen Mary. With the
accession of Queen Elizabeth, a moderate form of Protestantism was developed,
while persecution of Catholics, became part of official policy. Those who
remained true to the old religion, known as recusants, included one of the
greatest musicians of the period, William Byrd. In
the circumstances of the day he wrote only three Mass settings, each suitable
for use in a private chapel, as were the large number of sacred Latin texts
which he set. As a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal he provided music for use in
the established Church of England, in addition to secular music, madrigals and
instrumental pieces.

The murder of his
unfaithful wife and her lover by Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, in 1590 has
added to his fame. Gesualdo's fanatical interest in music was furthered by his
second marriage, in 1593, into the d'Este family, rulers of Ferrara. His
madrigals belong more properly to the following period of musical history,
showing, as they do, the characteristic peculiarities of harmony that marked
the so-called second practice, the new music of the coming century. His sacred
works are very much in the same style as his madrigals, the former exemplified
in his five-voice Peccantem me quotidie (Sinning daily and not penitent,
fear of death perturbs me), taken from the Office for the Dead and published in
Naples in 1603 [22].

Elsewhere Protestant
Europe developed its own national traditions. The French psalms of Goudimel,
using translations by Clément Marot, include relatively simple musical versions
for general use. The setting of Psalm CXXVIII, Bienheureux est quiconque (‘Blessed
are all they that fear the Lord’) offers a more complex example, in motet style
[23]. In Germany still newer styles were introduced, as in the work of
composers like Michael Praetorius.

[2] Secular Music

Secular vocal music
finds a place, above all, in the madrigal. Developing from earlier Italian
vocal forms, the madrigal provided an element of popular entertainment in
part-songs, music apt for viols or voices, in which a vocal line might be
replaced by an instrument, according, largely, to the taste and fancy of the
performers. The Italian tradition found particular expression in the England of
Queen Elizabeth and her immediate successor, with composers that include Byrd.
Closely associated with the madrigal is the solo lute-song, a song with lute
accompaniment, of which the famous lutenist John Dowland was a noted exponent.
One song, in particular, enjoyed the widest popularity. This was the melancholy
Flow my tears, an embodiment of a humour that was the height of fashion
in England in the last years of the sixteenth century [24]. The lute-song is
further exemplified in the work of the composer-poet Thomas Campion and others
[25].

In Italy, the first
home of the madrigal, there is a tradition stemming from Arcadelt and the
Venice-based Flemish composer Willaert to the curious chromatic experiments of
Gesualdo. It was here that the madrigal found another later place in dramatic
entertainment by composers such as Adriano Banchieri [26] and Orazio Vecchi.
Drama derived from the pastoral or from the stock characters of the commedia
dell'arte could be expressed in a series of part-songs, comic, satirical or
more serious in intention. Those accustomed to spoken drama or to opera may
find the form a strange one. It was, in any case, soon to be replaced by the
latter.

[b] Instrumental Music

Instrumental music of
the later Renaissance is closely allied to vocal music. The lute, in its many
forms, retains importance as achordal instrument. Keyboard music holds a place
in church organ repertoire and in the repertoire of the English virginalists,
Byrd [27], Orlando Gibbons [28], John Bull and others, with their sets of
variations and dance movements. Other instruments continue the tradition of
consort music.

CD2

The Baroque

Music historians have borrowed much of their terminology from the visual
arts, not always appropriately. The Baroque, whatever its visual connotations,
has come to be a term that is descriptive of a period in the history of Western
music from about 1600 to about 1750. It is convenient to divide this into three
parts, Early, Middle and Late, each sub-division spanning a period of fifty
years.

Early Baroque

The principal change that took place in Western music towards the end of
the sixteenth century lies in the shift of emphasis from counterpoint to
harmony. If counterpoint is the art of setting one melody against another,
harmony is the art of combining notes in chords and placing these in a coherent
sequence. In notation counterpoint is horizontal, harmony is vertical.

Experiments in chordal writing accompanied a late result of Renaissance
interest in the world of ancient Greece and Rome. Rhetoric, the art of public
speaking, always an essential part of ancient Greek and Roman education, had
its effect on drama and on music. This is first seen in so-called dramatic
monody, the setting of words to a melody that closely follows their rhythm and
natural intonation, accompanied by appropriate chords. It was a relatively
short step from this to a more ambitious attempt to re-create ancient classical
drama. Opera, the most essential of Western European art-forms, has its origins
in late sixteenth century Italy.

[a] Vocal Music

[1] Opera

Italian opera had its earliest experimental
forms in Florence. The composer often credited with the first complete setting
of a drama in music is the Roman Emilio dei Cavalieri, whose remarkable
morality, the Rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo (Representation of
Soul and Body) was performed in Rome in 1600 before a distinguished audience [1].

The first opera to retain a place in the theatre was the work of Claudio
Monteverdi, at the time in the service of the Duke of Mantua and the composer
of varied sets of madrigals. L'Orfeo, the story of the legendary Greek
musician Orpheus and his attempt
to save his beloved Eurydice from the Underworld, a demonstration of the power
of music, was staged at the court in Mantua in 1607. Orpheus, as he approaches
the dark river that separates the land of the living from the Underworld, tries
to induce the ferryman of the dead to carry him across in an ornate aria that
is echoed by instruments, the sounds of which re-echo [2]. The King of the
Underworld allows Orpheus to reclaim Eurydice, on condition that he does not
look round to see if she is following him. In his anxiety he turns, on his way
to the upper world, and loses her, to be finally re-united by the intervention
of Apollo, as stars in the sky above. L'Orfeo was followed in 1608 by Arianna,
the story of the abandonment of the Cretan princess Ariadne on the island
of Naxos by her lover Theseus, whom she had helped to escape. The opera is
lost, except for Ariadne's famous lament, the object of much later imitation
[3].

Monteverdi's later
career, from 1612 until his death in 1643, was in Venice, where he was able to
provide dramatic entertainment for private performance and for the public
theatres that were later established.

[2] Sacred Music

It was presumably with
an eye to his chances there that he had written, in 1610, his magnificent
setting of the service of Vespers, a work well-suited to the special
effects possible in the great Basilica of St Mark [4]. In Venice Monteverdi
became director of music at the Basilica in 1612, a position he held until his
death.

Religious changes
brought further musical changes in Europe, in particular where Protestantism in
its various forms took on national colours. The Church of England had its own
characteristic form, the verse-anthem, for solo voices, choir and instruments.
In Germany, soon divided by the Thirty Years War, Italian influence is seen in
the work of Schütz, a pupil of Monteverdi, employed for much of his life at the
court in Dresden [5].

[b] Instrumental Music

Before Monteverdi's
appointment in Venice, the position of organist at St Mark's had been held,
from 1585 until his death in 1612, by Giovanni Gabrieli [6], who followed his
uncle Andrea Gabrieli in the service of the Basilica. He represents, rather,
the height of the older tradition of St Mark's, making full use in his music
for brass ensemble and for other instruments, as in his vocal compositions, of
the resources of the place, in particular in exploiting, as Monteverdi did in
his Vespers, the possibilities of divided groups of performers, one
group echoing or answering another.

The Early Baroque
brings the start of an ensemble recognisable in modern terms as an orchestra.
Monteverdi himself provided a list of specified instruments to be used in L'Orfeo,
no longer leaving the choice to performers. The period coincides with the
growing importance of the violin, seen from famous makers in Northern Italy and
in music written for the instrument.

Dance music was, as
always, an element of polite entertainment, reflected in the French dances
collected by the German composer Michael Praetorius, the author of a valuable
work on the instruments of the day, a source of much present knowledge [7].

Keyboard music,
whether for the harpsichord, clavichord or organ, again underwent changes. In
particular the tradition of the English virginalists, Byrd, Orlando Gibbons and
their contemporaries, was handed on to the Netherlands, notably to Sweelinck
[8] in Amsterdam, whose pupils had a fundamental effect on North German organ music
and ultimately on the music of J.S. Bach. Parallel to the work of Sweelinck are
the achievements of the Italian keyboard composer Frescobaldi, who similarly
bridges the artificial division of Renaissance and Baroque.

While the lute
continued to enjoy a popularity only rivalled by the modern craze for the
guitar, there were some who preferred the viola da gamba, specifically the bass
viol or a form of it. Viols, like other instruments developed in the sixteenth
century, came in families, ranging from a small treble instrument to an
ancestor of the modern double bass. Bowed instruments, with six or more strings
and with the notes marked out on the fingerboard, as with the modern guitar or
the contemporary lute, the viols were well suited to the demands of domestic
music-making, although there were professional players who boasted very
considerable virtuosity on the instrument. They were generally played seated,
held downwards either on the knees or between the legs. Among those in England
who proposed the viola da gamba or leg-viol as a rival to the lute was the
retired soldier Tobias Hume, who published in 1605 and 1607 two volumes of
music in defence of his views. In these he included pieces designed for, or
dedicated to, distinguished patrons of the day [9].

Middle Baroque

The Middle Baroque, an
artificial period that we may date roughly between 1650 and 1700, brings more
marked national differences. In France there is specifically French opera,
drawing also on earlier preoccupations with ballet. In Italy operatic
traditions continue, now for a wider public, while orchestral forms develop,
particularly with the concerto grosso. In Germany there is the beginning of
that great synthesis of Italian melody, French dance and German technique that
brings the whole period to its culmination in the following century.

[a] Vocal Music

[1] Opera

Essentially Italian in
its origin and early diffusion, opera continues as a spectacular entertainment,
both private and public. The opening of public theatres had led to a mixture of
comedy and tragedy. Elements of comic relief had already found a place even in
the later work of Monteverdi. Composers like Cesti and Rossi are masters of the
form, which brings its own by-product in dramatic cantatas, and, not least, in
the remarkable series of Baroque laments that extend the form used by
Monteverdi in Arianna, abandoned on the island of Naxos, to a series of
situations, imagined or based on history, tragic or comic. The opera composer
Cesti offers a particularly poignant lament in his Lamento della Madre Ebrea
(‘Lament of the Hebrew Woman’), imagined in the days of suffering when the
Temple was destroyed by Titus [10]. Laments of this kind, generally following a
repeated harmonic formula, allowed the most varied historical and geographical
settings.

In France opera owes
everything to the Italian-born Lully, who created a form suited to the French
language and the French taste for dance, a genre continued by his successors.
Lully dominated French music until his death in 1687, collaborating with
Molière in comedy-ballets, and with Quinault in a new form of tragic opera. His
Ballet d'Alcidiane of 1658 is one of the first of his attempts at the
form of the French court ballet [11].

In German-speaking
countries Italian opera predominated, but there were attempts at a national
form of opera, notably in Hamburg, and a growing repertoire of popular German
musical entertainments that have their parallel in other countries. England,
with its strong theatrical tradition of spoken drama, added to the repertoire
of the court masque. It is possible that Henry Purcell's only opera, Dido
and Aeneas, had its origin in such an entertainment. Based on events
recounted in Virgil's Aeneid, the short opera tells the story of the
fatal love between the Trojan Prince Aeneas and Dido, Queen of Carthage, ending
in her moving lament and death [12]. Purcell went on, however, to contribute to
a combination of music and drama that is a characteristically English
compromise, now generally known as semi-opera and heard in King Arthur, The
Fairy Queen and other such works that often allow music a supernatural
rôle.

[2] Sacred Music

As opera diverged with
the growing feelings of national cultural identity, so sacred music took
differing forms. In Italy the more elaborate forms of church music found
expression in the polychoral works of composers like Orazio Benevolo. His Missa
Azzolina written for the Roman counsellor of Queen Christina of Sweden,
Cardinal Azzolini, makes use of two choirs [13].

Something of the
Italian style found a place in France with composers like Paolo Lorenzani,
bringing personal and artistic conflict between competing champions of French
and Italian taste. While Lully wrote a series of grand motets, he found a rival
in Marc-Antoine Charpentier, a composer who had studied in Italy and rivalled
him in stature. In the service of the Duchess de Guise, the King's cousin, and
of the principal Jesuit church in Paris, he made a major contribution to sacred
music in Paris in a style that appealed to Italianate taste [14].

German-speaking
countries, divided, broadly, between a Protestant north and a Catholic south,
had their own appropriate styles. The latter had generally depended on Italy
and, in particular, on Venice. The former, with composers like the Danish-born
Buxtehude in Lübeck, was subject to various limitations, as religious practices
dictated.

Protestant England was
able, after the brief interruption of Puritan government under Cromwell, to
resume earlier practice in the more or less elaborate musical forms demanded by
the Anglican liturgy, whether in settings of the services of the Book of Common
Prayer or in anthems, settings of additional texts, exemplified in the music of
Purcell [15].

[b] Instrumental Music

The second half of the
seventeenth century brings a continuation of the earlier tradition of consort
music, notably in a series of conservative Fantazias for viols by
Purcell. These include a remarkable composition based on a continuing sustained
note, around which other instruments weave their melodic lines [16].

Keyboard compositions
continue in the form of dance suites from composers such as Purcell in England,
with their counterpart elsewhere. In France, the land of dance, suites for
harpsichord include the work of Louis Couperin [17] and of his even more famous
nephew, François Couperin. The sets of harpsichord compositions by the latter
include a number of character-pieces. Of these Les abeilles (The Bees)
is an example [18].

In southern Germany,
often under Italian musical influence, a composer such as the Protestant Johann
Pachelbel, who had spent time at St Stephen's Cathedral in Catholic Vienna,
created a new synthesis of styles. Particularly famous were his many Magnificat
Fugues, written during the years he spent as organist at St Sebald in
Nuremberg. These served as preludes to the singing of the Magnificat at
Vespers [19]. In northern Germany the tradition of Sweelinck was continued by
composers like Buxtehude, the great organist of Lübeck whom Bach and Handel, in
their turn, travelled to hear. Composers in the Lutheran tradition were able to
draw on the large repertoire of existing chorales for their raw material [20].

The second half of the
seventeenth century finds the string orchestra finally established as a basic
ensemble, with the five-part French orchestra of Lully giving way to the
Italian four-part orchestra of first and second violins, viola, cello and
double bass, the last two doubling. In Italy the trio sonata, for two melody
instruments, usually violins, a chordal instrument and a bass instrument, the
cello or viola da gamba, finds a leading place. This form of sonata might be in
serious church form or in lighter chamber form, the latter offering a series of
dance movements. A leading figure of the time was the violinist-composer
Arcangelo Corelli, who left four dozen such sonatas [21]. From the trio sonata
came the concerto grosso, the form in which a smaller group, like that
of the trio sonata, is contrasted with the main body of the orchestra. The Roman-born
composer Alessandro Stradella, who spent the final years of his relatively
short life in Genoa, made use of this type of concerto form in the instrumental
preludes to many of his vocal works. In one such, at least, he makes
significant use of a solo trumpet [22]. In the concerto grosso, however,
Corelli is supreme, to be much imitated in the years after his death and the
publication of his concertos in 1713. The best known of his concertos is the
so-called Christmas Concerto, which includes a characteristic Pastorale,
suggesting the shepherds in the fields near Bethlehem at the birth of
Christ [23]. The form was much used by other composers of the period.

The Italian concerto
grosso is a preliminary to the solo concerto of the early eighteenth century,
but something of the solo concerto had already found a place at the great
Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, where Corelli had once studied. San
Petronio, with the space it offered and what was often a significantly large
musical establishment, fostered its own style of music for solo trumpet used
melodically and not merely for a symbolic fanfare or military signal.

The closing years of
the seventeenth century brought inevitable changes, as opera took on new
stylized forms and instrumental music found a new freedom. All is ready for
that final summary of the High Baroque that is to follow in the synthesis of
Italian, French and German represented in one form by the music of J.S. Bach
and in another by that of George Frideric Handel, with his final addition of an
English strand to the mixture.